It doesn’t cost much to learn the spending habits, medical histories, and political affiliations of thousands of people. That information is bought and sold by data brokers every day, and used by other companies for targeted advertisements, harassing phone calls, and general snooping. As Pando’s Yasha Levine points out, the private sector’s data collection is about as scary as the federal government’s, despite arguments that corporations can’t put “warheads on foreheads.”

Now the Federal Trade Commission argues that data brokers should be more transparent in their dealings, and that consumers should have “greater control over the immense amounts of personal information about them collected and shared by data brokers.” The agency has asked Congress to consider legislation that would make those changes and, maybe, allow consumers to go about their lives without worrying that their every move is being recorded in a database.

The FTC’s report focuses on many of the things that privacy advocates have complained about for years: that collecting so much consumer data can lead to discrimination against certain groups of people, and that giving so much information to private companies poses a serious security problem. Given the number of data breaches and security scandals revealed over the last year, the agency lags behind the rest of the world in thinking that it’s time for a change.

Still, it’s refreshing to see that the FTC can take time to ask a do-nothing Congress for support in protecting consumers from companies they’ve never heard of, even though those companies know if someone is pregnant, what medications they are prescribed, and the books they read. Perhaps the confluence of ineptitude will eventually distort itself into some meaningful reform.

The FTC said Congress should require the creation of an Internet portal where data brokers can identify themselves, describe the data they collect about consumers, and give consumers the opportunity to opt-out of data collection.

The FTC also said data brokers should also be required to tell consumers if they are inferring conclusions based on raw data—for example, if a broker collects Internet and offline data to deduce that a person is “financially challenged” or at risk for a certain disease.

Bloomberg Businessweek names some of the data brokers implicated by the FTC’s report:

The Hill describes the government’s other efforts to curb data collection:

In addition to the FTC, other arms of government have also focused on brokers’ use of data in recent weeks and months.

This month, a White House report on the broader concerns about companies using vast quantities of information, known as “big data,” which can make it easier to discriminate against consumers for one reason for another.

There are thousands of data brokers operating today. The industry churns through somewhere around $200 billion in revenue annually. Together, these companies have detailed information on just about every adult in Europe and North America.

They comb every possible source of digital information: Internet activity is monitored and mined through cookies and third-party trackers; transaction records are bought in bulk from retailers and analyzed; public records and social networks are scoured and scraped. What kind of books did you read? What kind of prescription drugs did you buy? Make political contributions? Married? Pregnant? When’s your due date? Watch political documentaries or donate to environmental groups? Or maybe duck hunting shows are more your thing?

Given the frequency with which these breaches are occurring, it seems that having to change passwords for at least one website every few weeks is going to become the new normal. In the meantime, hackers are able to get away with personal information that isn’t quite so easily changed, such as someone’s name and physical address. Having to change some passwords isn’t fun — having to live with the fact that someone has all of this other information is even worse.

This is the agency we’re supposed to trust with the Internet. If it can’t create a decent system for text messaging emergency dispatchers, how is it supposed to regulate something that affects essentially every industry, hundreds of millions of people in the United States, and several billion around the world? While you go ponder that, I’ll be sending smoke signals to the fire department to get this cat out of my tree.

Booker, which helps service businesses better engage with customers online, has raised $35 million in a Series C round led by Medina Capital, with participation from strategic investor First Data, Jump Capital, and Signal Peak Ventures, as well as existing investors. The New York City company now sees 3 million appointments booked monthly across 73 countries in 11 languages on its platform. [via Booker]

PCH, a company which “helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into brands and makes a variety of consumer tech products for major companies such as Apple,” has acquired Fab for a reported $15 million in cash and stock. Fab previously had a $1 billion valuation and raised $325 million. It will “continue to focus on design” at PCH. [Source: Bloomberg]

BlackBerry has unveiled several new smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, including the touchscreen-focused BlackBerry Leap and a device with a “dual curve slider,” in addition to its keyboard-equipped products. [Source: New York Times]

March 3, 2015

“I hope to have a bigger presence in the tech world. I love coming up with different app ideas, and I have a few more that are coming out. Once you get started and you have this creative bug of ideas that you want to get out, I feel like I’ve partnered with the right team, and now I have the creative outlet to make that happen. I’m happy that people are into it and perceiving it well. I just want to create more apps.”

PayPal is planning to acquire Paydiant, the company behind CurrentC — retailers’ answer to Apple Pay — for a reported $280 million. No word yet on how the companies will mix, nor if Paydiant’s relationship with the industry group behind CurrentC will remain intact. [Source: Re/code]

Microsoft is in talks to acquire Prismatic, a news aggregation service that uses natural language processing to recommend content in which its users might be interested, according to a report from TechCrunch. Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook are all said to have expressed similar interest in the company. (Which is surely a sign of actual interest and not at all an attempt by someone at the company to make it seem like a hot commodity — right?) [Source: TechCrunch]

March 2, 2015

“Just wanted to confirm that the rumors are true — I’m excited to be running Google’s Photos and Streams products! It’s important to me that these changes are properly understood to be positive improvements to both our products and how they reach users.”

Samsung has announced Samsung Pay, a competitor to the Apple Pay product included in Apple’s latest iPhones, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The feature will allow new Samsung Galaxy S6 owners who use MasterCard to pay for goods with their phones. It’s not clear when other credit card companies will be supported. [Source: The Guardian]